Digital natives, Digital Immigrants-Mark Prensky

This article by Mark Prensky explains reasons why there has been a decline of education in the US. he believes that "singularity"- (an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is absolutely no going back) is the arrival & rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century.

He also mentions that today's student represent the first generation to grow up with this technology & how their entire lives are surrounded by & using computers, videogames, music player etc. He describes these "new students" as "Digital Natives" & that they are all "native speakers" of the digital language of computers, video games & the internet.

Those who are not born into the digital world,(the "older generation") have become fascinated by & adopted many or most aspects of the new technology are, and always will be compared to the digital natives. Mark decribes them as " Digital Immigrants".

according to the writer,one of the problem faced by these digital immigrants is that as they speak an outdated language, they are struggling to teach a population who speaks an entirely different language. Digital Natives are used to receiving information very fast & are likely to parallel process & multi-task. But digital Immigrants typically have very little appreciation of thse new skills that the Natives have acquired & perfected through years of interaction & practice.

When it comes to dealing with this problem he considers both methodology and content. He mentions that today's teachers have to learn to communicate in the language and style of their students. this means going faster, less step by step & more in parallal and randomness.

Second, is the content:
"Legacy Content" which includes reading, writing, arithmetic, logical thinking, understanding the writings & ideas of the past etc: a more "traditional curriculum".

"Future Content" is to large extent digital & tecnological. while it includes software, hardware, robotics, nanotechnology etc. It also includes ethnics, politics, socilogy etc. Future content is increasengly popular & extremly interesting to today's students.

Finally, the writer mentions that if digital immigrants educators really want to reach digital natives- i.e, all their students- they will have to change.